Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  He never reported any of this conversation to Ida, of course. She’d have said Mary Hibbert fancied him and that this was disgusting. Ida was always thinking that women fancied him, which was so daft he never replied to her taunts. Ida knew he was faithful and that he always had been. She was his one and only woman, which might have surprised some people. He’d watched Jim and Steve grow into teenagers and been half appalled and half admiring at how many girlfriends they’d had. Over and over again, while his sons were growing up, he’d pondered the same questions: would he have married Ida if he could have had sex with her without marriage? Had he confused lust with love? There had been no other girl he had ever wanted or loved. Only Ida, ever. He’d chased her, pursued her, besieged her. But supposing she had been happy to have sex with him as soon as he’d asked her out, the way his sons’ girlfriends did, because they wanted to, not because they were forced, what then? Would he have discovered that he didn’t love Ida at all? Because that was what had happened soon enough, this separation of physical passion and emotional feeling. Once Ida had given birth to Steve, she had hardly ever wanted sex. He’d had to plead, and she gave into his pleading only grudgingly, but he never forced himself upon her. His need of her humiliated him – it wasn’t as though Ida was attractive any more and yet he still wanted to make love to her. This urge to do so seemed to exist independently of Ida herself, almost as though he was willing her to be the girl he had once been so overpoweringly attracted to. And now, of course, since the operation, that side of their life appeared to be over, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He’d never thought life was meant to be all about pleasure, but nevertheless there had to be some pleasure in it to make it tolerable. Where did he find pleasure in Ida these days? There was none. She didn’t gladden his heart. At the best, what he felt for her was pity, that she should be so miserable and afraid all the time, and beyond that only a kind of affectionate loyalty because of their history together. They’d been so young, and their youth had made all the struggling to carve a decent life for themselves easier, both of them good workers, both healthy and strong. It had been a pleasure, then, to come home to Ida after he’d worked such long days. She’d been cheerful and welcoming, thrilled that they had their own two rooms, excited about the coming baby. And when Jim was born this happiness had continued for a while. Ida was always singing, the baby contented, what more could he have wanted? Weekends they went for walks. Ida liked to walk then, she liked pushing the pram. She’d made picnics, just a few sandwiches and a bit of cake and a flask of tea, and they’d walked along the river and found a nice spot and sat there and sometimes he’d fished (illegally).

  All gone, long since. But would his life be better, happier, without Ida? He couldn’t bring himself to think so. If Ida died and he survived, what would his survival amount to? Lying awake into the early hours, as he often did now, he’d got into the habit of staring at the ceiling, tracing the cracks in the plaster over and over again in the dim light, and longed to be back in his own big double bed with Ida beside him. But they had been ‘put asunder’ – it came to him suddenly, the words of the marriage service, ‘let no man put asunder’. Except it wasn’t a man that had parted them but disease, and before that ageing and time and familiarity. Cancer had only finished the process off, or nearly. Death would finish it off. He wanted back what he had once had, and if that meant he still loved his wife then something would have to be done to bring her back to him, but what? Still cycling along, he thought of Mrs Hibbert again, and wondered what she would make of it all.

  When she was away, she’d asked him to go into her house now and again to check that everything was in order and to water her plants. She’d given him her key, though he’d been reluctant to take it and had said so, but she’d brushed his anxiety aside – ‘Really, Martin, why ever not?’ – saying she trusted him implicitly and was offended that he didn’t seem aware of that. So he had had to agree to pop in, just a couple of times, but he hadn’t been comfortable doing so. He’d taken his shoes off at the back door and almost tiptoed through the house on his stockinged feet. There were plants everywhere, on window-sills and tables. The whole place had been left immaculately tidy, and he worried that he was somehow disturbing the arrangement of things without realising it. Moving from plant to plant (there were five) in the sitting-room with the watering can she’d left ready on the draining-board in the kitchen, he concentrated hard so that he would not spill a drop of water on the beige carpet. The carpet scared him. It was self-coloured, a smooth expanse of pale wool with the chintz sofa and armchairs islands of colour in the middle. He couldn’t get over how clean it was – not a mark on it. The window-sill was painted white and was spotless. Between two little flowering plants was a photograph in a silver frame. He guessed it was of Mrs Hibbert’s parents, because he recognised her features in the man’s face. The mother was slender and pretty, the father imposing, with a square face, big nose, and eyebrows that looked very black. It was a pity, he couldn’t help but reflect, that Mrs Hibbert was a female version of her father and not a replica of her mother. There was one other photograph in the room, on top of a mahogany bureau, also in a silver frame. It was of Mrs Hibbert and the man he presumed was her late husband – it had to be, surely, because the two of them were standing in front of what looked like a Town Hall, and she was carrying flowers and smiling. He was smiling too. He looked a nice man, scholarly, wearing rimless spectacles and with a fine head of hair. The hair was very fair, and he looked boyish. Martin stopped peering at this photograph and finished off the plants. It was odd, he supposed, and certainly grist for Ida’s mill, but Mrs Hibbert rarely talked about her husband. Maybe it was too upsetting, however long ago it was since he’d died.

  What, he wondered, as he checked the bathroom – he’d been asked to see that one of the taps wasn’t dripping, even though it had had a new washer fitted – had their lives been like? Mr Hibbert would have lived in a perfectly organised and spotlessly clean and tidy home. His clothes would have been scrupulously laundered, just as Mrs Hibbert’s own were – Martin had never seen her less than beautifully turned out. As a wife, Mrs Hibbert must have been a paragon of all the wifely virtues. None of Ida’s sloppiness. Just stepping out of Mrs Hibbert’s house felt a relief. And yet, as he locked the door behind him, Martin wondered if Mr Hibbert had felt constrained by such perfection? What if he’d found her mania for tidiness and cleanliness constricting? Could any man have felt truly relaxed in such surroundings? But maybe the man had been allowed a room of his own, a study, where he was able to be as messy as he liked. In fact, Martin recalled that Mrs Hibbert had once made a reference to a ‘sanctum’, that was the word, which her husband wouldn’t let her enter except once a year to do a spring clean. ‘You have no idea,’ Mrs Hibbert had said, ‘how appallingly dirty and untidy that room was, books everywhere, all quite undusted.’ But she had said all this quite proudly, as though it showed her husband was a true man with a will of his own which he exerted sometimes over hers.

  Martin’s final reflection on this subject, as he got off his bike, was that he couldn’t quite imagine Mrs Hibbert as an amorous wife. (That was how he put it to himself, amorous, though he knew this was a euphemism for what he really meant.) He could see no giving of herself. He simply couldn’t imagine Mrs Hibbert cuddling up to her husband the way Ida had once cuddled up to him. Martin felt ashamed to have indulged in such speculation, but his conclusion was that however wonderful Mrs Hibbert must have been as a wife he would not have wanted to be married to her. Being well looked after, living in a tidy, clean, extremely comfortable home, was not everything.

  He’d been looking forward to seeing Mrs Hibbert again, after her time away, but even before he put his bike in the shed he could see that she was out. The double gates into her drive were wide open, which meant she’d driven off somewhere. Odd, she hadn’t mentioned it when he’d dropped his strimmer off the day before, and she’d called out, ‘See you tomorrow, Martin.�
� Well, she’d likely be back soon, and he had plenty to do. He put his overalls on ready to start gardening, wondering if Ida would be up yet. Probably. It was her turn to do the flowers in church and she liked to do it in the morning. He’d offered to bring some chrysanthemums from Mrs Hibbert’s garden – huge, bronze heads on them – but Ida had scorned the idea, she didn’t want chrysanths, everyone chose chrysanths. It was lucky, he reflected, that Mrs Hibbert never went to church and took no part in any of the organisations to do with it, or Ida would have given them up. She was pig-headed enough. If Mrs Hibbert had joined the Women’s Fellowship, or the Bible-reading class, or wanted to help organise bring-and-buy sales, then Ida would have avoided all these activities and the loss to her would’ve been enormous. She hardly went out if it was not to attend some meeting or function to do with St James’s, so what a blessing it was that the woman she disliked had nothing to do with them.

  Martin strimmed the edges of the lawn valiantly and thought how strange it was that Mrs Hibbert seemed allergic to the Church. It didn’t fit in with what he knew of her. She was a Christian, he knew that, and she’d been brought up a strict Anglican, but she’d told him that she did not approve of what was happening to the modern Church. She disapproved of the new prayer book, of the sayings of various bishops, of women priests, and a whole list of other things. And she had detested the previous vicar of St James whom everyone else had liked so much, saying he had had no dignity and that his pastoral care was quite inadequate, which Martin knew perfectly well was not the case. He had gone out of his way to help Ida. But Mrs. Hibbert had also told him that she read her Bible regularly and said her prayers. She believed in God, and in an afterlife but had no need of any church-going. Martin had found all this interesting. Martin himself went to church only occasionally with Ida. He put his only suit on, spruced himself up, and accompanied her to Sunday morning service. He loved singing the hymns with her. His voice was nothing like as good as hers, but it was a strong, deep tenor and he gave it full rein. People tended to sneak looks at them as they led the singing in the congregation. He even felt that Ida wanted him there, for her pleasure. The only other time she needed him, to take her to the clinic, she resented her need. If she had been able to drive, she would have gone to the clinic on her own.

  Martin took as long as he could over the strimming, hoping Mrs Hibbert would come back, but she didn’t reappear, and there was no more work for him to do that morning. Rather late, he found a note addressed to him pinned in the back porch where he went to leave the letters he’d taken from the postman. Mrs Hibbert had had to go to a Friends committee meeting at St Mary’s and wouldn’t be back till later, so she asked Martin just to do the strimming and leave the rest till another day. His disappointment surprised him. Slowly, he tidied up and locked the strimmer in the shed. There were other people waiting for him to come and cut their grass, or trim their hedges, but he felt no inclination to go on to them. Instead, he got on his bike and rode off aimlessly, but in the opposite direction from home. If he went home now, Ida would be back from the church and annoyed to see him. She’d want to know why he was back so soon and why, as she always put it, he had a face like a wet week. Cycling along by the river he frowned and tried to frame in his head what he wanted to say to her, but nothing sounded right.

  He was out of the town before he realised it. He’d turned off the river path and gone over the bridge and had taken the second turning at the roundabout without thinking about it. Coming in the roadworks gang to this area from Manchester, as he had done at 18, he’d been amazed at how quiet it was, how few buildings of any description appeared in the landscape once the small town was left behind. Nothing much had changed in all these years. There was more traffic, but it was easily avoided, as he avoided it now, slipping off the main road on to a narrow B-road and then turning off that on to an unfenced road which ran over rough common land where sheep wandered about unconcerned by his presence. He felt like a schoolboy playing truant. There was a pub a few miles on, at a crossroads, and he cycled towards it promising himself a pint of bitter and a packet of crisps. Ida should be with him, enjoying this. But Ida hadn’t been on a bike for years and she wouldn’t want to be on one, nor would she fancy beer – she’d rather have a pot of tea in a cosy tea-shop.

  He reached the pub, had his beer and then sat in the afternoon sunshine for half an hour, watching a glider floating far away over the hills. There was no one to disturb the peace, no other customers at the pub, no one passing on the road, and the publican a grumpy fellow who disappeared the moment he’d pulled the beer. Draining the last of his drink, Martin promised himself that when he got home he would force himself to confront Ida. No good rehearsing what he would say, it would just have to come out, no matter how, just all this pent-up feeling that had been choking him up for so long. But it brought him out in a sweat to think about it and he had to go to the pub toilet and splash cold water on his face. What he should do was be natural, but he couldn’t remember what was natural, what he used to do. He strained to remember: he used to open the kitchen door and shout, ‘I’m back, Ida, how’s things?’ That was what he used to do, shout ‘I’m back’, cheerfully, and then walk in and find Ida and give her a kiss. He smiled as he checked this memory and found it to be accurate, but then as he went to find his bike and began the ride home he realised it was an old memory, a very old one. Cycling along again at a steady pace, he thought about how many years it must be since he’d done that. Five? No, many more. Ten? Twenty? Probably. It dated back to when he came home at the same time every day from work, and had that routine, the shouted ‘I’m back’, the search for her, the kiss. Well, he would try it again. Automatically, he speeded up, fairly whizzing along the road.

  He put his bike in the garage and walked briskly to the kitchen door, whistling to calm himself. He felt nervous and excited, eager to carry out this experiment. Clearing his throat as he opened the door, he shouted, ‘I’m back, Ida, how’s things?’ There was no reply, but then there often hadn’t been because she might be upstairs or have water running, or the washing machine on, and his voice, loud though it was, would have been masked. ‘Been a grand day, hasn’t it?’ he went on as he walked through the empty kitchen into the living-room. ‘I’ve been playing hookey, went for a bike ride.’ The living-room was empty too. He stood still and listened. The television wasn’t on, for once. He went to the foot of the stairs and called up ‘Ida? I’m back, been for a bike ride.’ No reply. He wondered if maybe she’d gone up for an afternoon nap and fallen into a deep sleep, which sometimes happened. He climbed the stairs as quietly as possible, knowing which ones could not bear his full weight without creaking, and gently pushed open the bedroom door. The room was empty, the bed neatly made. He checked the other two bedrooms, though Ida had never ever slept in either of them, and then the bathroom.

  She was out, his plan defeated. Slowly, he went back to the kitchen and wondered if he should make himself something to eat. It was just after five o’clock. They usually ate at six. He was hungry, ravenous in fact, what with the cycling and fresh air, and nothing in his belly except beer (the pub hadn’t even had any crisps). But Ida always cooked their evening meal, no matter what sort of state she was in, and she’d be offended if he started making something substantial now, so he took a couple of slices of bread from the bin, shoved a thick wedge of cheese between them and ate that. It helped, but not enough. He peered into the fridge and took two cooked potatoes from a bowl. Ida would call it spoiling his appetite but she didn’t know how huge his appetite was today. He wandered about the house, feeling restless and impatient, and in the end put the television on. When the news came on, he began to worry. Once it was finished, he worried more. Where was she? The only place he could think of was the church, but not at this time, not today, unless he’d forgotten there was some evening thing on.

  By seven o’clock, he was seriously concerned. It was almost dark and suddenly chilly as he stepped out of the house and went to look f
or Ida. She would not like him coming to find her if she was at some meeting or other but it couldn’t be helped; he couldn’t sit at home and wait any longer. It occurred to him that if he saw lights on in the church hall then he would know there was, indeed, something happening there and he could just wait patiently outside. There was no one else on the road, but then there never was at this time of the evening. Curiously, he felt less worried than before and turned the corner confident that he’d see the lights of the church hall blazing out. If they were, he thought he might just go back home and wait patiently after all.

  He rounded the corner and looked down the slight hill towards both the church and hall with a sudden sense of apprehension. No lights. All six windows in the hall, each set high up in the wall, were quite dark. Slowly, he walked towards it, not knowing what else to do, and when he got there he saw that the heavy double doors were locked. The church, across the road, was also in darkness. Perplexed, he went on standing there, trying to decide where Ida could be if not here. In the vicarage? It was a possibility – yes, she’d had one of her panics and he hadn’t been there, and she’d gone running along to the new vicar. Martin let out an exaggerated sigh of relief as he realised this, and went hurrying past the church towards the vicarage, thinking how fortunate it was that he had thought to warn the new chap what might happen. There were lights on in the vicarage all right. Even before he’d gone through the gates and past the huge rhododendron bushes which shielded the house, he saw that there were lights on, three of them, one in the porch, one downstairs to the right of the door and one upstairs, directly over the door. Now, should he wait outside for Ida, or ring the bell?